New generation PROMARENA development project looks to environmental stewardship as a mechanism for poverty reduction and peace

In Bolivia’s high valleys and Chaco region – a remote corner of the world where reverence and respect for Pachamama (Mother Earth) is an integral part of everyday life – climate change and land degradation are making family farming a very risky business.

In order to help poor farmers adapt to these changing conditions (and show their respect to Pachamama as they have done for centuries) the Natural Resource Management Project of the Chaco and High Valleys (better known by its Spanish acronym PROMARENA) is looking toward age-old practices of terrace farming and good old-fashioned competition as a mechanism for eco-friendly development and sustainable poverty reduction.

The eight-year US$ 15 million PROMARENA Project closed late last year after improving the lives and livelihoods of nearly 20,000 poor rural families.

“The environmental achievements of the project are quite impressive. Through the competitive resource allocation model, where project participants compete for project funding in public contests, the PROMARENA project helped to plant over 8 million trees and construct 803,012 ha of new terraces that reduce erosion and contribute to minimize the effects of desertification,” says Francisco Pichón, Bolivia Country Programme Manager for the International Fund for Agricultural Organization (IFAD). IFAD contributed US$12 million to the PROMARENA project.

How does the contest model work?
The contest model is being used across Latin America to ensure sustainability and build community-based, demand-driven support for rural poverty projects.

“The public contests (concursos) work by identifying a problem within a family. The family identifies a problem. They tell us that they want to improve their house, the ceiling is about to fall down, there aren’t enough rooms, they need a bathroom. The project looks at these needs through the contests and transfers the money to the families,” says the National Coordinator of the PROMARENA Program, Omar Tejerina. “Motivated by the economic resources, the families begin to work with local resources and with everybody in the family.”

Efraín Condori Quispe is a peach farmer that benefited from PROMARENA’s public contests. With a group of other farmers he competed for a grant to build a small dam and irrigation canals for his orchards. Quispe and crew won first prize with their three-dimensional “Talking Map” that mapped out how the community managed their natural resources in the past and how they planned to improve their management in the future. With technical assistance from PROMARENA, Quispe also added terraces to his farm to reduce erosion and improved the quality of his production by using organic fertilizer.

“Everything we had laid out with our talking map we’ve accomplished. We drew with our hands the past, present and future, and we’ve achieved these goals,” Quispe says.

During the project’s cycle, nearly 2.5 million ha of land were converted to organic, family-based vegetable gardens, new rainwater tanks (with the capacity to store over 1,150,000 m3 of water) were constructed, and around 1 million llamas and alpacas benefitted from better zoologically-based sanitary measures and care.

One of the most notable push-on effects from PROMARENA’s environmental work has been the raise in land prices across the region and improved earnings for area farmers. Land prices for project participants have increased ten-fold over the past eight years. “They started with nothing,” says Tejerina. “At the beginning of the project, a family with one hectare of peaches made US$100 to US$150 a year, now these families are making US$15,000 per year per hectare.”

With his improved income and asset base – at the beginning of the project Quispe’s land was valued at around US$200, now it’s worth around US$11,000 – Quispe is hoping to create a micro-business with his children that are currently attending university to become agricultural and industrial engineers.

“I won’t sell our land. It’s ours, and it’s not something that’s for sale because each day we learn more about how to management it, how to conserve,” says Quispe.

Addressing food security
Throughout the region the changing climate patterns, desertification and divers environmental risks are putting productivity levels at risk and affecting food security. In order to address this challenge, the project worked with various other international and national programmes to improve food security and increase productive yields in a sustainable manner.

“PROMARENA helped renovate over 4000 kitchens in the project area, improving substantially the living and working conditions of women, youth and children. And through the concurso (public competition) methodology, the project carried out 4800 concursos with almost 40,000 participants, transferring over US$4.5 million to project participants,” says IFAD’s Pichón. “The project also financed around 950 livestock, agriculture, handicraft and rural services business proposals with around US$2.4 million in investments, which generated around US$10 million in income for small producers.”

But the job is far from done. There are still high levels of food insecurity and malnutrition across the region and the natural ecosystems remain at risk. With this in mind, the Bolivian government recently signed a new loan agreement with IFAD for the US$15.2 million Plan Vida-Peep Pilot Project to Strengthen the Capacity of Communities and Families Living in Extreme Poverty, a three-year program that will be implemented by the same agency behind PROMARENA.

More than 53 per cent of project funding will work to improve natural resource management and production systems, 16 per cent will go to community initiatives and 11 per cent is dedicated for strengthening productive infrastructure.

PROMARENA’s Tejerina sees these types of environmentally oriented rural development projects as a mechanism for peace.

“I understand that many of our problems come principally from lack of basic necessities and the lack of food. With this in mind, as a project, I believe that we contribute to peace,” says Tejerina. “And the best way to contribute to peace is to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to have enough to eat and to have access to citizens’ rights.”

About IFAD

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) invests in rural people, empowering them to reduce poverty, increase food security, improve nutrition and strengthen resilience. Since 1978, we have provided grants and low-interest loans to programmes and projects that have reached several hundred million people. IFAD is an international financial institution and a specialized United Nations agency based in Rome – the UN’s food and agriculture hub.

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). The designations employed and the presentation of material in this blog do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of IFAD concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. The designations “developed” and “developing” countries are intended for statistical convenience and do not necessarily express a judgement about the stage reached by a particular country or area in the development process.